1000
by Lady Altair
Summary: We build our own Heaven of a thousand little joys. A series of vignettes on the members of the first Order of the Phoenix. Four: Caradoc Dearborn
1. Marlene McKinnon

She's one two three four fingers old and Martin is her world. It's magic, how her legs seem to lengthen; she can always catch him, even when he says he ran like it was the devil on his heels and not his little sister, her thin braids slithering across her thin shoulders. Marlene is fair certain that Martin _is _magic. He carries her piggyback to their grandparents' cottage when the sun sets behind the Cairngorms. It's summer and she's forgotten that he has to go back to school soon.

There aren't parents here, no arguments to drift through walls at night, no Mam who yanks the comb when she brushes Marlene's hair, no Da to criticize Martin until his shoulders stoop and his eyes get sad and heavy. There's just Martin and Granny (who has the gentlest hair-braiding hands ever and kisses them goodnight) and Granda (who leaves them sweets in their coat pockets and calls Marlene his darling little redbird and doesn't need any proof to know that Martin is the finest lad to ever draw breath) and the Highlands to run through while the sun lasts.

* * *

Granda reads her stories…muggle ones, since that's what he is. His stories are about rings and witches (evil ones, not ones like her) and talking trees and lions and worlds behind wardrobes. She remembers those because they're her favorites.

One summer, she has to visit him in the muggle hospital in Glasgow, which smells funny and is scary white and green. Her mam says he's going somewhere, and she asks him about it when she's sitting next to him.

He laughs and says he's going through the wardrobe. She crawls into bed next to him while the grownups get coffee and, grateful that he still smells like pipe smoke and peppermint in this nasty-smelling place, falls asleep.

Someone carries her off while she sleeps; when she wakes up she's at home in Stirling and Da says Granda is gone. And Marlene completely understands why everyone's crying. She cries too, she wants to go with him.

(Years later, even when she understands, when she knows better, there's still some part of her that believes Granda got through the wardrobe. Sometimes she reaches a hand through, and is always strangely surprised--no, _disappointed--_when it hits wood.)

* * *

Maisie Hill chooses her over James Fitzpatrick in a pick-up football match, even though Maisie fancies James and he's a much better player than Marlene, and it's only because they're best friends.

* * *

"Let's be brave—not reckless, Miss McKinnon—in **GRYFFINDOR!**" the hat calls out, and Marlene can't ever quite forget the roar of applause from the table awash in red and gold, the one-armed hug from the fifth-year girl who scoots over to clear some room for her.

* * *

She hugs Martin when he graduates from the Auror Academy, and Gideon bustles in and the three arrange themselves for a photograph. Marlene links her gangly, thirteen-year-old arms through theirs, and grins because the world is uncomplicated and the day is beautiful and Gideon thought her dress robes were pretty.

* * *

She loves him right then. Loves him with all the earnest intensity of a girl who's never had her trust broken, and he loves her too. And it might not last (it doesn't) and it might be foolish (she wakes up alone), but that night, when she shows up at his flat and he lets her in and they leave their mourning for Martin at the door to be picked up later, it's enough.

(Marlene can never quite decide if she regrets losing her virginity like that. Maybe she would've liked dinner and roses and a relationship, an awkward smitten boy and not a sad, serious man, but something stalls her from ever tagging the memory with 'regrettable.' It was love _right then _and though she'll spit venomous words at Gideon later, she'll never say 'I regret.')

* * *

Marlene tries heroin once and loves it. She feels like someone new, someone free and (ironically) clean. There's no sorrow or pain or worry for a little while.

Marlene tries heroin once and never does it again. She considers it her one perfect high and leaves it at that.

* * *

Sirius wakes her up one morning. "What are you doing today?" She has nothing to do and he has cancelled plans and it's a beautiful day and his motorbike is parked outside her flat.

They get high in Sefton Park and while away the sunny, warm spring day doing nothing. She has his bruises on her neck and he carries her piggyback to the takeaway for dinner, pushes her on the swing and curls up with her in the grass when the sun gets low, kisses her like she means something, gives her his leather jacket against the evening chill and pulls her arms around his waist when he gives her a ride home on his motorbike.

It's one perfect day, better than all the nights out and all the sex, and she feels like she belongs to someone for a little while and it doesn't matter if she's fucked up because he sure as hell is too.

When he drops her off and kisses her goodbye (and leaves the jacket, he says he'll be by later, maybe tomorrow night) she hopes (for the first time in a long while) for something. She hopes for another day like this one.

* * *

Marlene finds a muggle brochure for some South Pacific island in a Liverpool gutter and swears to herself she's picking up and moving there when the war's over. It's the first time she's ever thought _when the war's over _like it's something she's going to see. She sticks the paper to her bathroom mirror.

* * *


	2. Fabian Prewett

Molly loves to play house with him, because Gideon is too old to play the baby. Gideon plays school and Fabian plays house, because Gideon is old enough to learn two plus two equals four and Fabian is the only one that still fits in the little rocking cradle Daddy made for Molly's dolls.

Fabian loves it; Molly coos and cuddles him and sneaks biscuits for 'the baby.' She whacks Gideon's knuckles with her toy wand for getting things wrong until he cries and Mummy takes the wand away. Molly sulks in her room. Fabian sneaks her a biscuit and she promises he'll always be her favorite brother.

* * *

When Daddy tells stories, Mummy is a princess, and Daddy is the knight that rescued her from where she got put away in an ugly old house (except her mean family is her _real _family, so it's even worse than most stories.) Mummy scolds him, _Ignatius-don't-tell-him-that-he's-going-to-repeat-it-at-Christmas-dinner_ and Daddy makes the _uh-oh-Mummy-called-me-Ignatius-I'm-in-trouble-now _face because Mummy only doesn't call him 'Nate' when she's cross. She tries but she can't help but laugh.

Daddy digs out a tiara from Mummy's jewelry cabinet and puts it on her head and he transfigures three (blunt) swords from the curtain rods and hands two out to his sons, who then set about rescuing Princess Lu and Princess Molly from the 'terrifying dragon' (a ragged toy from Gideon's bed that Mummy animated for them.)

It's how they spend the rainy Sunday, the three boys laughing and planning daring rescues while Molly brushes and braids (and tangles up) Mummy's long, beautiful hair in Mummy and Daddy's big bed and they both try on everything in the jewelry cabinet, while the stuffed dragon paces outside the bedroom door, until Mummy calls out she needs to fix dinner, so Daddy hacks the dragon until the stuffing falls out and rescues his Princess and kisses her like a hero should. Daddy carries Molly and Gideon down to the kitchen, and Fabian holds Mummy's hand (because she's too tiny to carry anyone anymore.)

* * *

Seventeen-year-old Molly shrieks like Mum when she's angry, and Gideon and Fabian nearly lose their hearing when Molly catches the two spying on her and Arthur down by the lake.

Fabian figures Arthur's all right when he manages to calm her down and prise the wand out of her hand before she does something embarrassing to them.

* * *

The first time he kisses Dorcas Meadowes is awful. He's twenty-one and she's seventeen, and he meets her in Hogsmeade on a weekend he has off from work, all arranged in the owls they send to each other so regularly, and she is strangely quiet the entire time and he's convinced he's done something wrong (or afraid that this strange romance-by-owl-post is not living up to her expectations). When he says goodbye to her, he goes in to kiss her and misses completely, awkwardly kissing her cheek before steeling himself and pivoting his head to fix the situation.

She smiles at him, a little green, before something flashes across her face and she _runs _into The Three Broomsticks and to the loo. A disgusted fifth year exits immediately, scandal written on her face. "The Head Girl is being sick, somebody better take her back."

Fabian walks her back to Hogwarts and she has to duck off the path every few minutes to be sick. She tears up in humiliation, explaining she hadn't wanted to call off the date for fear of offending him, and he lightly assures her it's quite all right, he'll take her whatever way he can get, stomach bug or no. A few days later, when he's flooing in sick to work, he kind of wishes she'd maybe just _postponed _things a while.

* * *

He wakes up quite sure he's dead, because the first thing he can sense coming out of the black is the warm smell of Dorie's hair and that's how he's always imagined heaven.

And then everything hurts, and he's quite sure he's not. Dorie's hair still smells nice, though, and he stays quiet as she sleeps beside him in the narrow infirmary bed.

* * *

She cries a little, both of them sitting together, trying to gather up the nerve to use the potion and find out for sure.

In all honesty, he wouldn't mind. Sure the world's going to hell, but are they ever going to find a better time? Dorie seems more preoccupied with the mess outside, though, and her hands shake.

But right before she does it, right before they find out she isn't pregnant, she turns her face up to his with a tremulous smile, uncertain but brave. "I like the name Nathaniel," is all she says. And there's no one to name, not this time, but Fabian keeps the name in his heart and waits for another day to pull it out, because he has a simple faith that that day will come.

* * *

He loses the engagement ring twice. The first time, he finds it behind the bin before Dorie gets home from work. The second time, he finds it in his sock drawer after Dorie cleans the flat on one of her days off work with a note underneath it.

_You should probably just ask me before you lose it again, Fabian. _

_Love you!_

_Dorie_

* * *

Molly names the twins after her little brothers. It is the most beautiful and terrifying honor of Fabian's life. Frederick Fabian, even as a newborn, looks like a little monster, and his uncle is very proud.

* * *

She says yes. It isn't any big surprise, any great new revelation.

_But she says yes. _


	3. Gideon Prewett

Molly says only babies go crawling to their mummies and daddies during thunderstorms, and she's nine, she knows what she's talking about. But Gideon's okay with being a baby. He tries for as long as possible to stay in bed, ducked under the covers to muffle the thunder. It doesn't work terribly well, so he walks down the hall, jumping when the storm lights the hallway, with a quick-following crack.

Mummy's dark hair is a long braided rope across the pillows, her hand curled into the fabric of Daddy's green-striped pajama top. He lingers in the doorway, still weighing the possibility of creeping back down the hallway and braving out the storm.

"C'mon, Gideon, but don't wake your mum or Fabian." Ignatius Prewett's sleepy voice sounds from the bed, and he quickly obeys, wedging himself between his parents, jostling Fabian who sleepily kicks him in retaliation. Mummy snuffles and shifts and mumbles something like "Nate, whussat?' before pressing her face into Daddy's shoulder, her breath ruffling Gideon's hair, and stilling again.

Gideon stifles giggles, and Ignatius chuckles in the darkness. Another shot of lightning brightens the room, but Gideon just weasels further into the tiny gap between his parents, Fabian's poky shoulder sticking him in the back, and feels perfectly safe.

* * *

He paints pictures with Mum, home sick with the dragon pox from the village school one day. (Fabian had cried and begged to stay home too). He paints her a purple flower, because it's her favorite color, and she smiles so prettily and kisses his scaly green cheek, her thin fingers combing through his hair. "A love letter for me?" she asks, and he nods, and she helps him write 'love, Gideon' on it.

(He takes off work and helps Dad clean out her things a few weeks after the funeral. He finds the picture while his father's out 'catching some air'--which meant having a cry somewhere that didn't smell so painfully of his Lu--in one of her neat drawers, carefully labeled on the back: _Gideon, age 5. _He folds it up and puts it in his pocket. _A love letter for me, _he thinks, and tears are, for the moment, very far away and his mother is just behind the door.

* * *

He spends a week at Martin McKinnon's the summer after third year. Marlene, Martin's six-year-old little sister, follows them around for the first three days. Martin yells at her on the third day when she follows them out to the broom shed after breakfast and her face crumples tragically--Martin's corresponds, guilt writing across as his tiny sister trudges back to the house.

They postpone an afternoon of quaffle-tossing to give her piggyback rides and take her for an ice cream in town.

* * *

He's sitting with Fabian in their shared flat, listening to the wireless and not doing anything in particular.

"I'm going to marry Dorcas," Fabian says out of nowhere, as if the thought had just occurred to him.

Gideon nods thoughtfully. "Good-looking kids," he muses.

"Yeah," Fabian grins.

* * *

Marlene McKinnon, at nineteen, _floors _him.

She's beautiful like he somehow never imagined she would be. He should have known it, really—she looks like Martin, who himself had gone from lamentably spotty and weedy to the sort who could give Fabian—with all his genial, bumbling Prewett charm and disarming Black good looks—a run for his money. She's respectable-looking in the smart, mulberry-pinstriped robe set he (and Molly) helped Martin pick out for her graduation gift, her long dark hair woven around at the nape of her neck.

She grins when she catches sight of Martin (feeling guiltily relieved to note that she'd had something done about her bucked teeth) and runs in awkward, clacking high-heel-hobbled steps over to their table in the Leaky Cauldron. She sits down with them and talks so fast about her new assignment at Gringotts, giddy in excitement and pride, while Martin listens, a brotherly grin on his face, and Gideon mentally explores various different ways of removing her clothing.

(He's fairly sure he loved her a long time before that, but it's _that _Marlene, light and confident and innocently hopeful in her newfound adulthood, that he first _wanted, _that he fell _in _love with.)

* * *

She takes him back, and she shouldn't. Marlene should laugh in his face, harden her pretty brown eyes and scorn him.

But she hardly hesitates at all. He says _let's try _and her face lights like fairy lights on a Christmas tree. She smiles and Gideon almost wants to shake her; _what are you doing, you're better than this! Walk away like the proud princess you are!_

But he's weak in the moment, and—if nothing else, even if he is worthless and bad for her, he _loves _her—the slide of her arms around his neck is bliss, her breath hot and sweet through his jumper. The trust in her eyes is tarnished, but he can barely see it behind the joyful way they're lit.

He's never felt more relieved in his life; it feels like a great wrong has been almost erased. She'll forgive him, let him pretend he did everything right, always treated her with all the respect she deserves, as long as that joy blurs out the distrust and disappointment and hurt he scarred into her eyes when she woke up in his bed, naked and sore and very alone.

(The marks aren't gone; they're stray pencil marks, rubbed out, but the paper underneath is just slightly greyed, and there's still the scarred dents of words and deeds that can't be undone. He loves this memory for what it could have been; a real beginning, and not just a prelude to another ending.)


	4. Caradoc Dearborn

Caradoc's mother sings to him in Welsh when she puts him to bed. He doesn't understand the language, but the smooth flow of her voice over the syllables lulls him to sleep almost against his will, the warm smell of her sticking in his nose.

* * *

David Price pushes Anna Rowe into a muddy ditch when she kisses him on the cheek. She cries and David walks away, leaving Caradoc to help Anna out of the mire and take her hand and walk her home.

She grins at him at her garden gate and after that, it's Anna and not David who is Caradoc's very best friend.

* * *

The train ride back from Hogwarts is always Caradoc's favorite. His mother and father are waiting on the platform and he always near-runs through the barrier, back to the muggle station and the muggle train that will take him back to Beaumaris and to Anna. After his seventh year, she's waiting for him on the muggle platform and he kisses her for the first time ever, inspired by something grand. He asks her to marry him on the breath he drags in after their kiss ends and she laughs beautifully and they're wed before the leaves fall in autumn.

* * *

It's almost November, at 3:24 in the afternoon when Juriswizard Henley drops his exam results on his desk with no fanfare at all and brusquely congratulates him on his promotion. He dances in his tiny little office with the door closed and can't wait to get home and tell—

(It's a happy memory, but it ends there, just before he thinks of his wife. A muggle casualty doctor in Wales records the death of Anna Dearborn at 15:31 and moves on to the driver of one of the other vehicles involved in the accident.)

* * *

He joins the Order of the Phoenix because he is useful and, as he sees it, doesn't have all that much to lose.

And then Benjy Fenwick claps him on the back and Edgar Bones shakes his hand and Dorcas Meadowes hugs him tightly.

By the end of the first meeting, he's already gained far more than he's prepared to lose and he doesn't regret it at all.

* * *

Hestia Jones is nothing like Anna Rowe. It's what he thinks when he looks at her. She stands in the middle of a smoky, crowded muggle club, managing to slosh most of her already half-empty drink onto the floor, her bright, beautiful silk dress wafting as she wobbles in her heels. His first instinct is to protect the silly little hummingbird (that's what he always thinks of Hestia as, beautiful and frivolous and entirely impractical) from the presumptuous attentions of the well-dressed muggle man while Maggie and Gideon shout at each other over the music and Sturgis, among others, tries to cool the two down and no one can spare a thought for wobbly, intoxicated Hestia.

She doesn't needed him to intervene. Her voice carries. "I would rather you not touched me, thanks," she says firmly, in a voice that belies only little of her state, a haughty, lovely stone look on her flushed face.

It's not much of a moment, really, but if this is not the moment he first loved her, it is the moment he knew he could.

* * *

Caradoc, entirely without thinking, stops finding pieces of Anna in Hestia. Hestia's smile stops being beautiful because her bottom lip curves a little like Anna's. Her quirky, surprising little comments stop being funny because sometimes they sound like something Anna would say or think. The perfume he bought her for Christmas (Anna's favorite) runs out and he buys her another one instead. He stops trying to find the tints in Hestia's hazel eyes, begins to appreciate the golden green.

He stops looking for someone else in Hestia's pretty face.

* * *

James Potter invites him to the stag night and Caradoc can't remember much after Fabian Prewett pushes the sixth shot of Firewhisky into his hand. It is a good night, and the men around him could just be his friends. Sturgis walks him back to his and Hestia's place in Clapham, both of them too pissed to Apparate anywhere. Hestia, in a purple satin and black lace nightgown, laughs at the two of them and makes them both drink two glasses of water before shoving Sturgis into his room to pass out.

She makes Caradoc brush his teeth before climbing into bed with her. He falls asleep with the taste of her mint toothpaste in his mouth and his head on her chest, her hands in his hair and everything with a golden Firewhisky haze on it.

_Love you love you love you, _he thinks as he falls asleep.

* * *

Ophion Selwyn goes _down. _It has cost them all dearly, and Hestia cries on his shoulder in his office after the ruling, but they stand together in court with Daniel Abbott and listen to guilty verdict after guilty verdict read aloud, there is some little piece of sense in the sacrifice.

It's not much of a victory, but they refuse to stand down, to bow their heads in fear and submission and there is some triumph in that alone.

* * *

It's not planned and the timing couldn't be worse. Hestia's still an apprentice, still subject to all the hardships and unreasonable workloads of the position. She's only twenty two. They're not married. Her parents don't approve. There's a war. They're in the top twenty on You-Know-Who's hit list. She's not sure she's ready to do this at all.

It's a foolish accident, but Caradoc _loves _that child before she's even finished the sentence to tell him.

Hestia makes a miserable pregnant woman, but Caradoc thrills to every moment of it.


End file.
